


Into A Forest

by finisterre



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Challenges, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-27
Updated: 2010-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:15:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finisterre/pseuds/finisterre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They'll never take him again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into A Forest

Every night, he found himself back in the forest, helpless again.

One minute, he would be lying sleep-addled in the semi-darkness, protected by grubby but solid institution-green walls, the next it was night in the forest, the air thick and alive with static electricity that made every cell in his body vibrate at a mitochondrial level...

 _...the tang of pine sap, freezing air knifing through his lungs, twigs snapping underfoot as he stumbles, the light swooping, swooping, and nowhere to run..._

It lulled him, it froze him. The light gentled his animal terror and made him accept when he should struggle. He knew what was coming -- pain, tests, The Place -- so why couldn't he struggle?

When the brightness swallowed and blinded him, he always heard the shrill crescendo of the taken, shrieking and pleading for it all to end. He awoke screaming his throat to sandpaper each time.

After a week or so, they began to drug him every night to stop him disturbing everyone. The chemicals stole most of the day. He surfaced at about 6pm as the doses wore off, only for a needle to plunge him into shapeless, blurred dreams at nine.

When he was in that precious three-hour window of lucidity he was moody, aggressive and resentful of the way time was eroding, months crumbling away into nothingness. But even with his senses tamped down, some small part of his consciousness could claw its way out and be sickened by what it saw.

That scraggy, drugged and drooling wreck slumped in the threadbare armchair; that wasn't him, it wasn't. His unfocused eyes watched the petty, territorial wars waged every day in the recreation room -- arguments over broken CDs, missing chess pieces and crushed ping-pong balls -- while his mind chanted "Got to get out, got to get out".

It was about then that he began referring to himself in the third person. When he said his name out loud, it felt as if he were a real human being again. It was also the only way he could describe what They did to him without his muscles contracting and moulding him into a shaking, fetal huddle on the doctors' couch.

He felt the burn of injustice whenever he thought about how the doctors kept him locked in here despite his fear. He had no faith that iron bars and old-fashioned locks could stop the light from spiriting him away. No one believed his story. Story of his life. This was his punishment for telling the truth about what had happened.

In the first few years, he tried to convince them that all he needed to get well was to go back to the people he loved. But each time they moved him to a new facility he had to start all over again, explaining about Them and The Place and how everything would be all right if the doctors would only let him go home.

He just wanted to go home. Home was where she was; the one fine and incorruptible part of his life. Every day he had new, piercing flashes of memory: of bright hair whispering across the back of his hand, of sliding a knuckle down the vertebrae of her neck, of her strong, pale hands stroking the warmth back into his cold flesh as he climbed between smooth sheets. One series of fragments recurred in vivid, painful patterns.

 _... lying so close together that his breath stirs her eyelashes. Smell of soap and salted skin and freshly laundered cotton. He has to leave soon, to go to the forest. He knows it will be dangerous. "I'll always be here with you, wherever you go," she says. Fingers press over his heart. He bends to kiss her smile..._

Always he tried to reach for more of the memory but it darted out of reach like a fish, silvery quick. Then there was his son. He had spent hardly any time with the baby before he was dragged away again, couldn't remember his boy's name or face, but he wanted to see him. Be a family again. Maybe They would leave him alone if he wasn't alone any more.

Sometimes he wondered if the light might take the boy in his place. This was not a thought he was proud of and he banished it as quickly as he could. All he knew was he had to get back to her, just as soon as he could remember where she was.

He knew it wouldn't be easy to convince them to let him go, so he applied his training to the problem. Psychology. Try to psyche them out for a change.

He began with the nurse he liked best. Hattie was large and reassuring, it felt as if nothing could possibly go wrong while she was there to look after you. The smell of cheap skin cream and the grape-flavoured lipgloss that was always smeared across her chapped lips followed her in a sweet, comforting slipstream. Working here hadn't dulled her spirit or her compassion yet but she was lonely and that made her talkative. If he could convince her, maybe he could convince them.

"I'm an FBI agent," he told Hattie one spring night as she bustled about, preparing his nightly dose.

"Sure you are, darlin'," she said in her chocolatey voice, Jamaican accent beating through every syllable. She drew the plunger up, up, until the syringe was filled with pale liquid. At first he thought she believed him but the amused look on her face soon dowsed that small spark of hope.

"No, really Hattie, I am," he said. "I chased criminals for a living. I was shot in the line of duty. Look." He touched a scar.

Hattie shook her head with a smile. "Well, this is your only shot for today."

She tapped the syringe on the metal tray. "Come on now, honey, roll over." He shook his head in resignation and bared his hip for the injection. He would have to explain it better next time.

Two nights later it was her shift again.

Halmstad in the room next door was screeching some song or other again. "As I bring you up to Labrador..." he howled off-key for the fifth time in as many minutes. It was disturbing Hattie, she was unhappy and that displeased him.

"Halmstad!" he roared. "Knock it off." Luckily Halmstad had been on the sharp end of his temper in a recreation room fight last Thursday night. There was silence.

"Thank you," Hattie said softly.

"You don't belong here, Hattie," he said. "You're too good for this place."

She shook with a sudden belly laugh. "Bless you for saying it, darlin', but my bank manager likes me at this place just fine."

" _I_ don't belong here, Hattie," he whispered, watching her closely. Her cheerful expression melted and her kind, brown eyes narrowed. "I have a family. Got someone waiting for me. Got a son whose face I'm forgetting. I'm taking so many meds that I can't remember my boy."

He knew that would make Hattie respond. She had once told him her own boy was working at a software house on the west coast and she never got to see him -- airfares and wayward sons being what they were these days.

Hattie's broad brow creased and she was very gentle with him that night.

 

Within one week he had an assessment with his psychiatrist and within two he was on oral meds at half the dose he had been on before. The dreams came back with a vengeance. His lower lip was permanently puffy, bloody and grooved with teeth marks from biting back the shouts as he woke each night but that didn't matter, the first part of his plan was in place. He was *awake* again.

Six months later, he suddenly had an opportunity too good to miss. Burton was very young, very smart but green as grass. He had nurtured a small, patchy brown beard to announce his arrival from grad school into the world of grown-ups, yet he still looked like a gawky, solemn teenager wearing his father's best suit.

His tiny cubicle office was overrun with psychology and neuroscience texts. They gave Burton only the safest, most pliable patients -- and since March, that had included him. 

He knocked on the door for a session one Tuesday morning and found Burton the Boy Wonder putting together a set of shelves in a futile attempt to impose a little order. But Burton hadn't been able to borrow the power tools from the hospital handyman so he'd borrowed a long manual screwdriver instead. It perched on the edge of the half-assembled shelves, steel catching the sunlight, catching his eye.

If a sharpened screwdriver can be a powerful weapon to a criminal, an unsharpened one is no less dangerous in the hands of a man with strength and determination. The doctor came to realize that as it was pressed under his ribs, as his hands were tied to his chair with the expensive silk tie his parents had given him when he became John Stuart Burton PhD. A quick search of Burton's jacket pockets uncovered a small penknife that smelled of oranges. Its blade glinted wickedly as he waved it near the doctor's neck.

"I'm used to handling weapons, I was an FBI agent," he told Burton. That had the desired effect.

Burton, who diligently read every patient's file, knew he had killed before. It only took them three hours to get the tactical team in place and deny his request for a helicopter out of the hospital. The phone rang constantly. They told him to give himself up, no one need get hurt, they could talk it through... When they finished this spiel for the tenth time, he said one thing: "I want to speak to her."

"Who is "her"?" the ops commander asked.

"You know who. You *know* who."

"Calm down. Calm down." A silence followed. "She may not want to come. She lives in California now, not the next state over. It'll take time."

The ops commander was hedging.

"All I have is time," he said and put the phone down.

"What now?" asked Burton.

"More waiting," he replied with a shrug.

 

3am is the nadir of the circadian cycle and he was so very tired. He sat in the darkened office, watching the moonlight-limned trees sway in the wind, seeing their shadows blur and coalesce on the lawns outside the window.

When his eyes drifted shut he felt the forest call. A cough startled him and he looked up.

"They're waiting for you to fall asleep," Dr Burton said in a reasonable, steady tone, as if explaining some logic problem to a particularly dim student. "If you fall asleep, they'll storm the office and then they might hurt you. I don't want anyone to get hurt."

"Me either, Doc," he replied but pressed the screwdriver into Burton's neck all the same. "But you know I don't sleep much. And if I do, the forest wakes me up again."

"The forest?" Burton asked, trying to draw him out.

"Yeah, the forest." He didn't bother explaining. There was no reason why Burton should believe him any more than the rest of them had.

The call came as dawn broke. It had taken them just ten hours to locate her and fly her to the hospital. He knew that must mean she had been waiting for the chance to see him.

Burton was slumped forward in a restless REM sleep when the harsh trill of the old-fashioned phone smashed the silence. The doctor lurched awake with a cry. He snatched it up, barking his name, just as he used to do when he was an agent.

"Hey..." The voice quavered. "It's me." He exhaled shakily, delighted to hear her again.

"Thank God," he whispered. "Thank God. You should hear the BS those guys are giving me..."

"I want you to listen to me," she interrupted in that low, calm voice he remembered so well now. "I know you're scared but this is doing no good."

He shook his head in confusion. What was she talking about? She understood, surely.

"I want you to give it up now. I just want you to be safe. Let the doctor go," she said, her voice beginning to crack. "Please. No one wants to hurt you."

He couldn't believe she was siding with the enemy against him. She *knew* what They were capable of. He had told her often enough. Didn't she want him to be free to escape?

He tried to explain: "You have to get me out. Please. I can't stand it in here. They can find me in here. They can get me any time."

"Who can? *Who* can get you?"

He felt his temper, simmering until now, begin to boil over. "I've told you before. Them. Didn't you listen to me?"

"Yes. Yes. I did, but..." His voice was rising, rising, until it was a howl. "It's *Them!* They can find me anywhere. You know that. You of all people should know that."

The next instant he regretted his sharpness as he heard the soft sound of her crying, muffled banging as the phone passed from hand to hand, the shuffling of feet and fluttering of papers.

"I can't do this, I just can't..." she was saying in the background. Sobbing. "I'm sorry, I can't help him any more. I didn't want to come. I have another life now."

He felt his muscles pull towards the fetal position at that betrayal. His wrist unlocked. The screwdriver dipped away from the fuzzed arc of Burton's throat, slipped through flaccid fingers and clanged against the scuffed parquet flooring.

He knew that she had loved him without reason once -- loved him so much it was almost in contradiction to her nature. If she didn't even want to help him that meant They had got to her.

He ignored the tinny squawking from the receiver and put down the phone. Burton licked his dry lips, eyes glazed over with fear. Fear, at least, was something he recognised.

He slipped the tiny penknife between Burton's wrists and sliced. The silk tie fell in two pieces. Burton gasped and fell forward, rubbing his wrists. He picked up the frayed, strained cloth and handed it to the doctor.

"Sorry, doc," he mumbled. "Sorry for ruining your tie."

He curled into a ball on the couch and didn't even look up as Burton stumbled out and the restraint team came in, sprouting lethal weaponry and needles full of oblivion.

A week later the the review board met, transferred him to a high-security correctional treatment center in Marion, Virginia, and upped his medication. He refused to take it whenever possible.

Time passed. When he remembered her, instead of clutching at the memory, he let it drift by. She was Theirs now. He had to look after himself.

He had an appointment with the psychiatrist again today. The guy would tell him that he must take the drugs, that nothing was going to harm him. Same old lies.

But lately he could feel Them coming, like a twist in his guts, like a slick of coppery blood at the back of his throat, like sharp metal shards forced into the nerves beneath his teeth. Panic and fury flailed for dominance in his head and he knew that he couldn't let the light touch him, couldn't stand to hear again the voices of the abducted, screaming to be rescued, when they all knew no one would save them.

It was simple. Someone else would have to go to The Place in his stead.

They were never going to take Duane Barry again.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a two-hour improv: five elements, two hours of solid writing. The elements were from JHJ Armstrong and Cofax: Cordless screwdriver, broken CD, grape-flavoured lipgloss, and a quote: "As I bring you up to Labrador"
> 
> This is one of those pieces of fanfic which is fiercely context dependent. It was written during the Mulder abduction arc and relies heavily on the reader knowing that to spring its trap. I'm not sure it works so well without that febrile atmosphere. Title is from The Cure.


End file.
